New city official to oversee community cultural plan

The community cultural plan that Matt Chasansky hopes to oversee in 2014 will ask residents what they want "the personality of Boulder" to be and then identify the tools to help make that happen.

Chasansky is the new arts and culture manager for the city of Boulder. He took over a role that had been vacant for nearly three years after serving six years as director of arts and culture programs at Denver International Airport, a tenure that started with the installation of the infamous Blue Mustang.

"DIA was a fascinating time and lots of things going on, but one thing it didn't have was a community," Chasansky said. "We had 53 million people a year passing through and lots of projects, but I was looking to use my skills to really affect people's lives."

Chasansky had been on the job just three days when historic floods poured through the city, and one of his first initiatives as arts and culture manager was to coordinate a temporary public art installation focused on the impact of the flood.

He said there is increasing recognition around the country that public art should be more than just statues in parks and that it should have a sense of vibrancy and immediacy that connects it to people's lives.

While street-level public art will always be vital to urban areas, he said, government is in a position to facilitate art projects that engage the broader community.

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"There is a lot of value in temporary public art, in participation, in performance, in how artists can be effective in the public realm," he said. "The city is just the right partner. Those types of projects only work if there is a high-level view of the community that government is uniquely placed to see. This is first and foremost about spending public money, and we want to make sure we do that with the public in mind."

With a new Boulder Arts Week planned for April, with artists in north Boulder pressing for a formal arts district designation, with a community group exploring the feasibility of a performing arts center in central Boulder, with the remodel of the main library and with the city implementing a new Civic Area Master Plan with a significant public art component, 2014 could be a year when important components of the city's arts scene start to "gel," Chasansky said.

"Boulder is in this amazing position of being perceived as being an arts center, as well as a center of green industry and science," he said. "There's a real sense that there are a lot of artists and creative professionals, and we've survived the great recession better than most people because of these creative individuals. We have a lot of great assets, but things haven't gelled yet."

The community cultural plan will compare Boulder's arts scene and level of investment to other benchmark cities and seek input from the community about what they want from Boulder in terms of the arts. It will also look at what tools the city can use to implement that vision and encourage more investment.

"It's less of a master plan," Chasansky said. "It's going to ask, 'What does the community want the personality of Boulder to be?' And the city will help provide the tools to create that."

Annette Coleman, a multimedia artist based in north Boulder, has been active in efforts to get a formal designation for the North Boulder Arts District, which is centered around Yarmouth Avenue and Broadway. The designation would allow the district to apply for grant funds from the state and expand its programming.

She said north Boulder artists aren't waiting on the city, and they're going ahead not just with their monthly (except January) First Friday events and with two more "little libraries" to join two that were installed last year.

However, many cities invest far more in arts infrastructure than Boulder does, Coleman said. Actually filling the position of arts and culture manager is an important first step, she said.

"We've been behind the other communities because we haven't had a staff person, a person who knows how to rattle the tree so the fruit will fall," she said.

Coleman said a major concern is that rising rents in north Boulder will force more artists to leave for places like Fort Collins, Loveland and Longmont.

Artists in north Boulder want to work with the city and developers to create affordable live-work spaces around common workshop and gallery space.

Coleman said there is nowhere in Boulder right now that focuses exclusively on the work of Boulder artists, and the city needs to invest in this resource or risk losing it.

"Just like the city of Boulder supports our parks system and our open space system with money and staff support, we have this wonderful space where artists live and work, and we don't want to lose that," she said.

Richard Turbiak, chairman of the Boulder Arts Commission, said hiring Chasansky, particularly with his experience in public art, has been an important step for the city.

"It was important to get the leadership coalesced, and bringing Matt Chasansky on board adds a level of cohesion that wasn't there before," he said.

Turbiak said the "community" piece of the community cultural plan is key. The plan should not just describe how the community can support the arts but how the arts can support the community.

The arts do need more money, Turbiak said, and the plan represents an opportunity to make the case for that investment.

"The arts need to put the case together for why the arts should be funded, and we have that opportunity in 2014," he said. "We have the opportunity with the community cultural plan to say, 'This is why we support the arts.'"

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